The Wrong Way to Handle Terrorism

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Radical Islamic terrorism has plagued the Western world and the Middle East since the late 70’s. Islamic terrorism entered the Western world on April 12, 1985 when explosions shook the El Descanso restaurant in Madrid. That blast killed 18 people and injured 82, including 11 American servicemen. Over the course of almost four decades, over 20,000 people have been killed and over 50,000 have been injured in these attacks. The world hasn’t stopped, let alone contained this threat.

The most recent attack was in Manchester, England during an Ariana Grande concert. This attack was carried out by Salman Abedi and his suicide bomb vest killed 22 and injured over 100 people, among those were children. The world responded how we usually do with a hashtag “#prayformanchester” and with a profile picture overlay.

This most certainly does it’s job and spreads awareness to the incident and usually leads to donation pages to give money to those affected by the attack. What this doesn’t do however, is stop the terrorists who seek to hurt innocent civilians.

To effectively stop terrorism, the Western and the Middle Eastern powers must stand together militarily and politically. The United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies have held the burden of this fight, militarily and economically. The United States alone has added $2 trillion to the national debt since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to thebalance.com.

Those that call for military action against Islamic terrorists are bombarded by people saying “Oh you’re just an ‘Islamaphobe.’” or “They’re just misunderstood and affected by racism and oppression.”

That is humanizing people who want to hurt others for no other reason than to hurt people. Most people know that the entire 1.6 billion followers of the Muslim faith are not terrorists. Most predominantly Muslim countries have an unfavorable view of groups like ISIS. The number of Muslims that have sworn allegiance to terror groups numbers to almost 300 billion, which equates to about 5.3% of the Muslim population, and only about 1.04% of the entire world population. Most those that want to stop Islamic terrorism don’t want to eradicate the Islamic faith, they want to eradicate those that want to hurt others in the name of a twisted interpretation of Islam and the Quran.

There is never just one right way to handle threats and problems. However, there is a wrong way. That is by making a hashtag and an overlay and then waiting for the next attack while calling those that want to or do take action “Islamaphobes” and “bigots”. To protect Western way of life, we have to take military action while working diplomatically with not only Western allies but the leaders of the Muslim world as well.